Los Angeles Times story on fan who broke the news of USC's interest in the Big Ten

When I was on the news desk at one stop about 20 years ago, we had a similar situation. Local Fox station had a translator that covered our area (apologizes to the TV folk here if that's not the right term) and set up a little newsroom. So we'd tune in every night for a while to see the North Valley news. With few exceptions, they repackaged something we had in that day's paper.

A few years later, I was sports editor at a different paper. One night the power girls basketball team in the county hung a 100-point win in a tournament. Next day, local ABC station calls and starts asking me a bunch of questions about it. Couldn't help much since I didn't cover the game, but after a while wanted to ask him how much he was getting paid to do the story, because I wanted a cut! In defense of the TV guy, their lead anchor (who was a good guy) was out of town with Podunk State at a bowl game and think he would have handled it differently. Still...

 

Years ago we had a local radio station that would read our articles on the air verbatim without attribution. They wouldn’t even rewrite them. If you listened close enough, you could hear the anchor turn the page for the jump.

 

At my first paper a local TV reporter was in a bar with a few colleagues and I after work and he was talking about cuts at his station and urging us to "write for the ear."

 

An NPR station would read all the top local stories from the local newspaper. It was obvious. Every day the same stories from the paper with the same headlines. I don't know if there was some agreement.

 

Somewhere on this site is the tale of the radio station that did rip-and-read of the local paper every morning without fail, and how one Friday night, for a basketball game with the local high school so far away the road the radio station didn't carry it, the paper went to great lengths to set a trap.

The paper covered the game, printed its Saturday morning paper, then printed one copy with the story flipped – local team lost instead of winning, say – with all the details turned ar0und. Then it made sure circulation delivered that copy to the radio station.

The phones at the station rang and rang when it reported the wrong result and details thanks to its poor work ethic. And the general manager of the station, if I remember correctly, called the paper and complained about inaccuracy.

 

Remember having the TV on in the newsroom when a murder we were all covering came on. Harrisburg ABC27 On-camera reporter read word for word what I had written for that day’s paper. I laughed and said “she didn’t even remove a ‘that.’”

 

Same channel.